THEOLOGY IN 'THE VICAR OF DIBLEY'

When The Vicar of Dibley began in 1994, I treated it with less attention than it deserved.  I was an atheist at the time, and bothering about vicars of either sex seemed like fiddling while the Church burned.   To change the metaphor, if I considered the issue at all, it seemed analogous to putting extra crew onto The Titanic so that more of them could be drowned when the thing eventually sank.  Parish council meetings typified for me the irrelevance that religion had become in my own – and in the nation’s – life. 

            I caught snatches of episodes and found them creditable, if over-the-top, comedy.  What failed for me was the batty old woman with outlandish recipes: marmite instead of chocolate.  Why?   This seemed to me the humour of desperation,  and it struck the same false note that I found with Rowan Atkinson’s performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral.  I was glad that she seemed to have faded out of the later episodes.

            Since then I have come back to religious faith and to a loose affiliation with the Church of England.    As such, I sat down recently to watch the series as a whole with a completely different set of assumptions.  As a sideline, I now understood the disappearance of the old woman: she died.

The Vicar of Dibley was an enormous hit for the BBC: at its height, drawing audiences of fifteen million.  It coincided with the ordination of women priests, and played an important role in encouraging their acceptance by the British public.  About this central theological issue of the series I simply do not feel qualified to comment; although I am aware that are theological issues involved rather than simply the need to combat social prejudice. 

            Overcoming social prejudice is, however, the way in which the series interprets any reluctance to accept female vicars.  Geraldine arrives with minimum preamble and says she supposes they were expecting a bloke.  Insofar as justifications for women priests are given at all they are that so many male vicars are gay – Geraldine’s bishop seems to have a succession of male partners – and that the previous vicar was virtually a woman so they might as well have the real thing. 

            Geraldine’s reason for choosing the ministry is The Sermon on the Mount and this – perhaps unconsciously – is the real clue to the theology of the series: which is overwhelmingly ethicist.  If you were a Martian, and watched The Vicar of Dibley to try and understand Christianity, then you would think Christ had said just two things:  “Love one another”   and “Turn the other cheek”; the latter, of course, subject to sexual innuendo from uncomprehending hearers. 

            But even if you take Christ as being nothing more than the source of ethical injunctions, some of these are more challenging than The Vicar of Dibley might suggest.  What about the call to a follower to take up your cross?   Then again, no relationship must matter more than loyalty to Christ.  Geraldine by contrast, in the earlier episodes has pictures of Christ and Sean Bean on the wall. At one point, she says that Sean Bean is the more important.  Any one could say as much in a lax moment, but there is nothing to suggest that this is not her real conviction, or that there is any reason why a female vicar should not have an extramarital sex life.  As Geraldine herself puts it, she is holy in more ways than one. 

Christ gave the commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength.  As it is, we are shown  a parish council with a Tory bigot – as far as the series goes, this is a tautology: a Tory is a bigot by definition; a closet homosexual who later outs himself; a libertine who appears never to have heard of Christian marital  ethics, never mind trying to follow them; a farmer whose sexual interest in his animals grows in proportion to his sexual interest in the vicar; and – until the death of the culinary organist reduces their number to two – three plain imbeciles.  For all I know, they may be representative enough of a rural parish; but what is lacking in all of them is any sense of loving God, or even believing in his existence.  To that extent, at least, the series is untrue to reality; and I suspect – assuming the presence of the indwelling Spirit within believers – in other ways as well. 

            Ego tripping.   In Christianity, pride is the greatest sin. With the episode Celebrity Vicar, Geraldine lets television appearances go to her head.  Things fall apart when her friends are ridiculed in the press, and she is ostracized as a result.  She apologises to them; but, again, there is no sense of anything other than a human dimension: no sense that she might say sorry to God.  

            It might be argued that religion should be kept out of comedy, but it’s difficult when the subject is religion: particularly a faith in which the cross – an innately unfunny image – is the central focus.   The mere fact that the series could have been made, though, is itself a tribute to the spirit of tolerance within Christianity.  Attempts to see the funny side of Islam have had unfortunate consequences: perhaps certain Danish newspaper editors had confused it with Christianity.   Unless they wanted to highlight the difference: make fun of Islam, and people die.

In the series, of course, the cross is not given any particular prominence: other than as a decoration on a jumper.   Preparation for the Christmas sermon is cited as the most important task in the Vicar’s year.  Following the lead of secular culture, Christmas in Dibley is the most important annual religious event.    The main significance of Easter, by contrast, is the Easter Bunny. 

As Tom Wright pointed out, if you remove the accounts of the Virgin Birth, you lose the opening of Matthew and Luke.   If you take out the Resurrection, you lose the whole of the New Testament.  Paul preached Christ and Resurrection: if the Resurrection has not happened then our faith is in vain.    If you can accept the Resurrection, you need have no trouble with  the Virgin Birth.  It doesn’t really follow the other way round. 

            In the second – and vastly inferior to the first –  Christmas episode, Geraldine says something to the effect that Christ had two things going for him: a really nice personality and a lovely fluffy beard.  At one point in the first episode, Christmas Lunch – and my personal favourite by far – she  does express some religious views that probably echo what a lot of the viewers at the time understood by Christmas.   A baby is born, the poorest of the poor.  His teaching – when  he grows up – to love one another still inspires millions.  He was put to death just for telling people to love each other.  He’s gone, but his message lives on.  She also believes he was the son of God; although what she means by that contentious expression need be nothing more than one unusually endowed with a sense of the divine.  I am guessing; unless I missed something, what she means by it is never explained.  It is also – again unless I missed something somewhere – the only time that there is any actual reference to God. 

            The teaching may still live on, but the rest of what Geraldine says is debateable.  It is probable that Joseph had quite a thriving carpentry business, just as Christ’s disciples – until they gave it up to follow him – probably made a prosperous living selling salted fish.  The idea of their poverty – Christ’s in adulthood was self-imposed, and genuine, and made possible because of wealthy disciples – probably derives from a later date when Christianity came to terms with the classical heritage, and probably reflects the distaste of certain Greek philosophers for any form of manual labour.  Christ was sentenced for blasphemy – for claiming to be God – and the execution was carried out by the Romans on the basis that Christ was King of the Jews and therefore a potential political threat.  The view that he’s gone would explain why, in the series, so much is made of Christmas  – the only new life is that arising from new birth – and why  so little, in comparison,  is made of Easter. 

            The doctrine of the Second Coming is touched on as well: but not as anything one ought to take seriously.  Alice latches onto the idea and wants to know when he’ll arrive; since not to tell people when you’re due is like being  a very rude guest.

 

There is a certain  experience you can have during a service in a great cathedral; or simply from walking round it during a choir practice..   You can admire the architecture, enjoy the choral element, meditate upon the social phenomenon that is the congregation,  but never once consider what the building and the services within it  have as their primary function.

            The Vicar of Dibley reminds me of that sort of situation.  The location is ravishing, the introductory music from the Christ Church  choir is haunting; we meet a series of lovable caricatures in some richly-human situations..  The story itself is life- enhancing: a newcomer to a small community overcoming initial prejudice to find  love. and acceptance: even indispensability.  Geraldine may not be able to give much in the way of spiritual advice, but there is no doubting her effectiveness as a counsellor, or of the Vicarage as a haven for the emotionally – I hesitate to say spiritually – troubled.

            The point is made over and over again: Geraldine is the best vicar Dibley has ever had.  Unlike the old days in which the congregation had consisted of the Parish Council, the church is now full. What is less clear is why she should not have been equally effective if offering a purely secular counselling service; or why the church should not be quite as full if it functioned simply as a social club.

 Within the parameters it sets itself, the series overwhelmingly establishes the case for female vicars.  But what it cannot do, by those very same parameters, is to demonstrate why vicars of any complexion should exist in the first place.  It may be great on Christ’s second commandment: that you should love your neighbour as yourself.  What is missing is his first commandment: that you should love the Lord your God.